Joseph Charles Farman

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Alternative Title:
Joseph Charles Farman

Joseph Charles Farman, (Joe), British atmospheric scientist (born Aug. 7, 1930, Norwich, Norfolk, Eng.—died May 11, 2013, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng.), discovered the “hole” in the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere above Antarctica. Farman’s observations provided evidence that rising levels of man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were contributing to ozone depletion in the stratosphere and confirmed earlier research by Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina, and F. Sherwood Rowland, who shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1995 for their respective efforts. Farman studied mathematics and natural sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and in 1956 he was appointed to the research team that became the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). From the mid-1970s he focused on monitoring and analyzing ozone levels over the BAS station at Halley Bay, Antarctica, using a Dobson spectrophotometre and weather balloons. Farman first identified the depletion in the ozone over Antarctica in the early 1980s, but he initially believed that the anomaly, which had not been spotted by NASA satellites, had to be the result of a faulty ground-based Dobson spectrophotometre. When a newly installed instrument showed an even greater annual depletion in the ozone layer in 1984, Farman reexamined his earlier readings only to find that between 1975 and 1984, annual readings in October (during the Antarctic spring) had fallen about 40%, with some years showing a decline of as much as 60%. In May 1985 Farman (with his colleagues Jonathan D. Shanklin and Brian G. Gardiner) published those findings in the journal Nature. (NASA later acknowledged that its satellites had detected the hole, but its data processors had been programmed to ignore anomalous data.) In September 1987 the international Montreal Protocol to regulate the production and use of ozone-depleting chemicals was adopted. Thereafter Farman divided his time between the BAS, from which he retired in 1990, and his position in the Cambridge chemistry department. Farman was made OBE in 1988 (the same year that he was named to the UN Environment Programme Global 500 Roll of Honour) and was advanced to CBE in 2000.